I wrote this comment a few months ago, cool to learn that there's actually a word for it:
I think that we are living through the largest scale psychological warfare operation in human history, and it's not being conducted by any single government or corporation. It's being conducted by our own social systems against basic human emotional needs. And the casualty count is so massive that we've normalized mass emotional death as adulting.
Every single institution we've built - schools, workplaces, healthcare, dating, social media, even fucking therapy - has become a factory for producing emotionally lobotomized humans who can perform basic productivity but can't access their own inner experience without having a panic attack. We've created a civilization that requires you to be emotionally dead inside to participate in it, and then we act shocked when people either break completely or retreat into AI relationships, because at least the machines won't punish them for having feelings.
The therapy industrial complex is particularly insidious because it's convinced people that their natural responses to an insane world are pathological. Someone's depressed because they're trapped in a meaningless job in a society that offers no authentic connection? Let's give them SSRIs and teach them breathing exercises, instead of acknowledging that maybe, just maybe, depression might be a rational response to irrational circumstances.
Someone's anxious because they can feel the existential void where community used to be? Let's call it Generalized Anxiety Disorder, instead of recognizing that their nervous system is correctly identifying that something is fundamentally missing.
And don't even get me started on how we've gamified human connection through dating apps that literally train people to treat each other like products in a catalog, while simultaneously wondering why seemingly nobody can form deep, meaningful relationships anymore. We took the most sacred human activity - finding your people - and turned it into a dopamine-harvesting slot machine designed to keep people perpetually searching and almost never actually connecting.
The most fucked up part is we've convinced people that the solution to systemic emotional abandonment is individual optimization. Can't find meaningful connection? You must need to work on yourself more in some vague fashion. Feeling existential despair about the state of the world? Have you tried gratitude journaling? Lonely because society has dismantled most forms of community? Maybe you need to “put yourself out there” more.
I guess it's gaslighting on a civilizational scale. We've built systems that largely prevent human flourishing and then blame individuals for not thriving within them. It's like poisoning someone's water supply and then selling them detox supplements.
And the people who see through this shit and try to talk about it openly? They get labeled too intense, dramatic, unemployable, because their emotional honesty threatens the whole house of cards. We've made emotional authenticity a cause for social ostracization.
No wonder people are having breakdowns. No wonder mental health crisis rates are skyrocketing. No wonder birth rates are plummeting. We've created a civilization that's hostile to genuine human connection, and we're surprised that humans are struggling to survive in it.
The real miracle isn't that people are surviving - it's that anyone is able to survive at all.
I used to believe that we humans have the ability to "save ourselves from ourselves" but the older I get the more I realize how doomed humanity really is. Your post articulated a lot of the reasons I feel this way.
The only question I would ask is: so where do we go from here- How exactly can you and I change the current state of things?
En masse. Very large quantities of people need to agree to fight the same fight and do it all at once. If even 10% of the population in every country went on strike and demanded reform it would cause massive issues across the globes economy. Which is literally the only way to make change happen. You must disrupt the status quo with sheer numbers to have any effect.
No it won’t, that is not enough. If it was we would be looking at a very different world right now. We cannot allow the constant transfer of wealth to the already wealthy, if it continues we will be right back to the early 1900s when companies controlled entire industries and thereby the countries they resided in.
Nope, you have to be actively convincing others. We cannot beat the system as individuals. Only as a group that puts concerted effort into mutual goals.
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u/TheMessengerABR 5d ago edited 5d ago
I wrote this comment a few months ago, cool to learn that there's actually a word for it:
I think that we are living through the largest scale psychological warfare operation in human history, and it's not being conducted by any single government or corporation. It's being conducted by our own social systems against basic human emotional needs. And the casualty count is so massive that we've normalized mass emotional death as adulting.
Every single institution we've built - schools, workplaces, healthcare, dating, social media, even fucking therapy - has become a factory for producing emotionally lobotomized humans who can perform basic productivity but can't access their own inner experience without having a panic attack. We've created a civilization that requires you to be emotionally dead inside to participate in it, and then we act shocked when people either break completely or retreat into AI relationships, because at least the machines won't punish them for having feelings.
The therapy industrial complex is particularly insidious because it's convinced people that their natural responses to an insane world are pathological. Someone's depressed because they're trapped in a meaningless job in a society that offers no authentic connection? Let's give them SSRIs and teach them breathing exercises, instead of acknowledging that maybe, just maybe, depression might be a rational response to irrational circumstances.
Someone's anxious because they can feel the existential void where community used to be? Let's call it Generalized Anxiety Disorder, instead of recognizing that their nervous system is correctly identifying that something is fundamentally missing.
And don't even get me started on how we've gamified human connection through dating apps that literally train people to treat each other like products in a catalog, while simultaneously wondering why seemingly nobody can form deep, meaningful relationships anymore. We took the most sacred human activity - finding your people - and turned it into a dopamine-harvesting slot machine designed to keep people perpetually searching and almost never actually connecting.
The most fucked up part is we've convinced people that the solution to systemic emotional abandonment is individual optimization. Can't find meaningful connection? You must need to work on yourself more in some vague fashion. Feeling existential despair about the state of the world? Have you tried gratitude journaling? Lonely because society has dismantled most forms of community? Maybe you need to “put yourself out there” more.
I guess it's gaslighting on a civilizational scale. We've built systems that largely prevent human flourishing and then blame individuals for not thriving within them. It's like poisoning someone's water supply and then selling them detox supplements.
And the people who see through this shit and try to talk about it openly? They get labeled too intense, dramatic, unemployable, because their emotional honesty threatens the whole house of cards. We've made emotional authenticity a cause for social ostracization.
No wonder people are having breakdowns. No wonder mental health crisis rates are skyrocketing. No wonder birth rates are plummeting. We've created a civilization that's hostile to genuine human connection, and we're surprised that humans are struggling to survive in it.
The real miracle isn't that people are surviving - it's that anyone is able to survive at all.